All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy is one of America’s most respected and honored novelists, even though until the publication of All the Pretty Horses none of his novels had sold over 5,000 copies. Allthe Pretty Horses won the National Book Award, a preview of another award, the Pulitzer, which McCarthy would win in 2007 for his book The Road. Of his style, the New York Times highlighted his “recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world.” All the PrettyHorses, the first of the Border Trilogy, follows John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old cowboy who in 1949 leaves Texas to live a life unencumbered by fences. The novel is unique in its ability to simultaneously embody and eschew two genres: the western and the coming-of-age tale.

Themes, Symbols, & Motifs:

American West. This is a place of wildness, a place of testing, where the law is scarce and one’s worth is measured by skill. But even in 1949 the reality has disappeared into romanticized myth.

Fate. John Grady takes responsibility and shuns the idea of fate. He chooses to believe and pursue the myth of the western cowboy and accepts the consequences of it, even if the world is not governed by providence.

Journey/Quest. The journey is more important than the end goal, because one’s goal and all physical elements fade, while a journey can resume.

Conflict & Loss. McCarthy’s story is consumed with both. The characters lose nearly everything: innocence, life, the past, relatives, money, their country/home, a ranch, and the girl.

Nature. The natural world takes precedence over the psychological. Characters stoically endure great acts of violence and rarely display their interior selves. Nature is presented as harsh, loss, a place where “the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity.”

Horses. People pass away, yet horses, as part of nature, endure. Consider also their connotations: wars/battles, medieval journeys, companions, innocence, ranch work, Indians. Nearly every character is connected by horses.

Discussion Questions:

Both Cole and Jimmy Blevins risk their lives for horses. Were their motivations the same?

What is the importance of the picture of horses in the Cole’s dining room?

If cowboys have a code of honor embodied by Cole, what is that code?

Compare the first scene with the last. Is this a happy ending?

Why does Alejandra reject John Grady?

What does John Grady learn from his conversation in the judge’s home?

Describe McCarthy’s writing style and its effect on the reading experience, particularly his description of landscape.

Analyze Cole’s dream of horses while he is in prison, especially the description that “they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.”

Compare McCarthy and the novel to these two genres and authors: Southern Gothic and Western, and Hemingway and Faulkner.

McCarthy has done only three interviews, and one TV interview. Watch it here and discuss.

In this brief essay, Bill McClay, current occupant of the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, takes on just one of the many issues of the permanence and accessibility of information published on the internet today. He raises three concerns.

Art is political. Period. Anyone who says it is not, does not know what they are talking about.
Gee, Drew, how do you really feel about it…
Of course, some art is more political than other art, though all good art is strongly political because the clearer, the more complex and important the themes and ideas promoted in that art are, the more political the piece of art is. Take film for instance. Frozen carries messages far more powerful and life-changing than does Kung-Fu Panda (1, 2, or 3), and it is greater art because of it.

Each year, Drew Trotter gives a talk on the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, what those nominees reflect about our culture, and how Christians can think about and respond to those films. He presents this talk at Study Centers, churches, and other venues throughout the year. This lecture was delivered on February 25, 2018 at […]

A.O. Scott, the chief film critic for The New York Times, had a problem. He had written a negative review of the famous Avengers movie of several years ago, a movie which proceeded to make $1.5B at the box office worldwide. Shortly after the review came out, Samuel L. Jackson, one of the stars of the film tweeted, “AO Scott needs a new job! Let’s help him find one! One he can ACTUALLY do!”

Now, neither the box office bonanza—which Scott predicted by the way in his review—nor a tweet by Samuel L. Jackson, one of the most powerful actors in Hollywood, was going to threaten the job of arguably the most respected film critic in America.